He walked away from a £1m per month business to build D.Louise even bigger | Jack Zambakides

Four and a half years ago, Jack Zambakides came on the pod running LS Personal Shopper: designer clothes for footballers and about £1 million of PlayStations a month in lockdown. He said he'd never take investment and that he'd sell within two years. Almost none of it went the way he predicted. Robberies helped end that business. He walked away, went all in on D.Louise, the jewellery brand he built with his wife, and moved to Dubai. This is two founders comparing what they believed then with what actually happened: focus, hiring, investors, founder mode, retail vs DTC, AI, and the biggest lesson from scaling that nobody tells you. Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/ltBAVubWL7I Jack's first episode (March 2022): https://youtu.be/zS7hUIJP65Q ✅ All my links are here - https://www.midnight.co 00:00 Four and a half years later 02:39 Leaving LS Personal Shopper 05:21 Building D.Louise 17:29 The bootstrapped grind 21:54 Blagging into Gymshark's world 29:30 Founder mode and hiring 40:34 What's driving growth 43:58 Retail, ads and trends 52:25 Trust and the customer 57:45 UK vs US 59:34 Money, ambition and being CEO 1:06:29 Could you do it again, bigger? 1:14:56 Dubai and the modern team 1:21:16 Pay yourself more 1:23:39 Quickfire 1:27:46 Advice to his 18-year-old self Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.